Almost a decade ago, Europeans and many progressive Americans were lamenting how the United States was going to miss out on the 21st-century paradigm symbolized by the robust European Union. Neanderthal Americans were importing ever more oil while waging a costly "war on terror" and fighting two conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our budget deficit in 2003 hit $374 billion.

The EU avoided foreign conflicts and embraced soft power. Its declining military budgets and centralized transnational government ensured that it could address global warming and fund ever-expanding entitlements. Even the poorer Mediterranean nations reached new heights of prosperity. The Greek economy soared. Spain's real estate market was to become the hottest in the world. Italy seemed to resemble Germany more than Portugal.

President George W. Bush was not just hated in Europe, but caricatured as the symbol of backward free-market capitalism, rank American consumerism and U.S. imperialism abroad. Only with the election of the progressive Barack Obama would Europe finally find a like-minded, sophisticated American president.

Yet European Union prosperity has now proved a phantom -- one conjured up by accounting gimmickry, borrowed German money and corrupt EU apparatchiks. Neither the EU at large nor most individual European nations can sustain their present rate of redistributionist entitlements. To end cash transfers across borders spells the breakup of the union. To embrace austerity at home ensures near anarchy in the streets of individual nations.

The worry is not that Greece will implode, but whether France can remain financially solvent. More realistic countries such as Germany, Latvia and Sweden are quietly drifting away from the socialist model, preferring balanced budgets, lower taxes and fewer regulations.

The EU may be worried that Obama's United States is becoming more like the EU at the very time many in Europe are starting to take a second, kinder look at the old free-market model of the United States. An America of low taxes, low unemployment and robust growth once meant a huge market for European goods, as the United States drove a prosperous world economy and had enough cash to protect the Western world.

All that has changed after four years of unprecedented $1 trillion-plus U.S. budget deficits. National debt has hit a historic $16 trillion, with no reversal in sight. Unemployment has been at 7.8 percent or above for 48 consecutive months. GDP growth is calcified at an anemic 2 percent. Record numbers of Americans draw on unemployment, disability and food stamps.

There is even greater irony in foreign policy. Europe blasted Bush for his cooked-up war on radical Islam and his needless interventions abroad. But with the ascendency of Barack Obama, Europe finally got a mirror image of itself. Both Iraq and Afghanistan will have ended according to strict timetables of withdrawal, not with any lasting security on the ground.

France and Great Britain went into Libya, while America "led from behind." Muammar Gadhafi's dictatorship was replaced with chaos that has birthed a terrorist haven that threatens to become the new Afghanistan. The odious anti-Semite and Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi now runs a near-bankrupt Egypt that looks a lot like Haiti. After the messes in Libya and Egypt, the West watched impotently as Syria became something like Mogadishu.

France is forced to unilaterally intervene in its old colony, Mali, to stop an Islamist takeover of the entire country. America watches from the sidelines, as undermanned French forces are offered meager logistical support from EU allies. In Algeria, radical Islamists brazenly executed dozens of Western hostages.

Yet Obama has found widespread public support for his new isolationism. Apparently, liberals prefer to borrow money at home for more entitlements rather than spend money on interventions abroad. Many conservatives enjoy the schadenfreude of watching as Europe plays (poorly) the old thankless unilateral role of the United States.

Obama has loudly promised a pivot in the U.S. security profile toward the Pacific region. That change represents the unspoken reality that socialist redistribution has reduced Europe to near-irrelevancy. Supposedly, free-market Asian economies are the new nexus of wealth and power. Oil and gas finds in America are providing unexpected energy independence from the Persian Gulf. Or perhaps the new strategic emphasis reflects the demographic realities of the Obama coalition of various minority groups -- and fewer European-American voters.

The Hawaiian-born and Indonesia-raised president certainly seems more interested in Asia than he does in the old colonial Mediterranean world of aging and shrinking European nations, Arab quagmires, oil intrigue, Islamic terrorists and the Israeli-Palestinian open sore.

In short, Europe got the European Union of its hopes and a changed America of its fantasies -- but both are rapidly becoming its worst nightmares.

Yes, you nailed the prevailing sentiment of the leftist ‘intelligentsia’. They really are delusional and think they are smarter than everyone else, with special insights. It's the “Oh, you haven't been to Europe?” crowd. Elitist as they come, but characterizing themselves as champions of the downtrodden. It sickens me to think of how much power we've given them to mess with the lives of the rest of us.

Charles Darwins Theory of Evolution (often referred to as The Theory of Survival of the Fittest) describes the positive effects resulting from any pressure on an animal species that removes the least fit among the species and allows only the most fit of the species to reproduce. Most of us are well aware of this Survival of the Fittest theory, but few are aware that Darwin also makes mention of the negative effects resulting from unlimited reproduction of a species least fit when the weak, the lazy, and the stupid are left unchecked.

We like to think otherwise, but our species, Homo sapiens, isnt that long out of the trees and the same laws of nature that affect all of Gods creatures apply equally to us. If we were to observe any other species that had been allowed to reproduce without limitations, we would know immediately what the consequences will be.

Whenever the weak; lazy; and stupid of a species is allowed to reproduce unimpeded by predators that feed off the weak; lazy; and stupid, they soon outnumber the strong, productive, and intelligent. When the weak/lazy/stupid dominate the gene pool, the entire population becomes weak/ lazy/stupid, and then the population collapses.

In the past, when these collapses occurred within human populations, they have been referred to as a Malthusian Collapse. Thomas Malthus, a Nineteenth Century Economist, thought these collapses were caused simply because past civilizations had reached a point where human populations could no longer produce sufficient food supplies to feed themselves, but he never pinned down the exact reason for these food shortages.

We now think these collapses of past human civilizations have occurred whenever the unproductive weak/lazy/stupid greatly outnumber the strong/productive/intelligent of the population. In other words, the majority of the population becomes too lazy to perform the work necessary to provide for themselves and whats left of the strong/productive/intelligent refuses to continue to do it for them.

These collapses have occurred at frequent intervals throughout human history, and Western Civilization is, in my humble opinion, currently on the cusp of one of these collapses.

6
posted on 01/24/2013 4:55:12 AM PST
by DJ Taylor
(Once again our country is at war, and once again the Democrats have sided with our enemy.)

When someone tries to impress me by saying “I’ve been to Europe and...” or variations on the theme - I cut them off and ask “Which part...the part whose ass we kicked or the part whose ass we saved?” (With thanks to P.J. O’Rourke)

The gene pool you talk about will be cleaned by a future world war. This world war came about by an Obama leadership vacuum will consume the entire planet. There will be NO safe place to avoid what is coming. The “weak; lazy; and stupid” are going to get what's coming to them, finally.

I remember a friend who’d been stationed in Britain saying that with socialized medicine and dentistry, “You’d see the most beautiful girl you can imagine, then she’d smile and you’d see these HORRIBLE rotten teeth.”

It was the same for most people there. The MP that helped pass all the socialized medicine programs died while on a waiting list for a CAT scan.

11
posted on 01/24/2013 6:39:59 AM PST
by Huebolt
( Where do we go from here?)

Make yourself as self-sufficient and sustainable as you can through gardening, alternative energy, and the means and will to defend it.
Ride it out. Only those who are of this mindset will be around “on the other side” of it.

14
posted on 01/24/2013 6:51:42 AM PST
by MrB
(The difference between a Humanist and a Satanist - the latter admits whom he's working for)

"Europe got the European Union of its hopes and a changed America of its fantasies -- but both are rapidly becoming its worst nightmares."....Europe has been like so many people who sit on the sidelines and complain but never actually do anything: put up their money, reputation or actually speak out because it might cost them something....THANKS Kaslin you always post good stuff......'V'

17
posted on 01/24/2013 8:13:32 AM PST
by virgil283
( *- Never give the devil a ride. He will always want to drive.-*)

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